Long Weekend

I love a long weekend. The kind that everyone takes at once. You can create a long weekend with a vacation day, but it's not the same. When you make your own long weekend work is still happening while you are away. People are filling up your inbox and your voicemail. Decisions are made without you. On a true long weekend, everyone is out of the office. No one is e-mailing me. No one is trying to get a hold of me. It's a huge difference.

I need a long weekend just now. Because, of course, of the fact that I am one giant glob of guck. It's allergies. The only thing that seems to work is good ol' fashioned Benadryl. I know. I'm a zombie now. I just want to sleep. They keep saying on news that it is one of the worse allergy seasons in a long time. No shit. You don't need a degree in meteorology for that one.

I haven't even had the energy to knit. Tomorrow I'm going to try to get something planted in my yard. Last weekend we pulled out the big giant ugly globe arborvitea that were in front of our house. I'm sure with me practically laying on the thing trying to pull the foliage aside while my husband hacked away at the roots with a shovel, the neighbors were wondering.

Pulling out the big, round, ugly arborvitea has left a big, dirty, flat patch of dirt. Tomorrow I have to do something about it. I'm going to need Benadryl, lots of Benadryl. And I need plants I can't kill. This is harder than it sounds. I can kill anything. And if I can't kill it, my husband can whack it down with a weed whip.

When we were first married we lived in a rented duplex. We moved because I was pregnant and as we had stopped flinching at the sound of gunplay, we decided we didn't want to bring up a child in that particular neighborhood. But the rented duplex had a little patch of ground that the previous tenants had used as a vegie garden. (Don't even get me started on my complete inability to grow anything edible) We couldn't really afford a bunch of bedding plants so I bought a shaker full of seeds that was supposed to create a wildflower garden. I sprinkled it all over my little patch of dirt and voila! flowers started to grow. Only problem is that wildflowers look a lot like weeds in the early stages. My husband mowed them down with the lawnmower. To say we are not proficient landscapers would be a gross understatement.

Of course my parents are avid gardeners, my sister and her husband can feed themselves out of their vegie garden, and my brother has a whole mad-horticulturist streak involving giant pumpkins. I am, once again, the family black sheep in this. So if you drive by this weekend and see a snot monster woman crawling along the ground with a little spade in one hand, something green in the other, and swearing like a sailor, give me a honk and a wave. Prayers are welcome too.